The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays. Beers Henry Augustin

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ one state to a mind in the other. All my opinions, affections, whimsies, are tinged with belief, – incline to that side… But I cannot give reasons to a person of a different persuasion that are at all adequate to the force of my conviction. Yet when I fail to find the reason, my faith is not less.”

      No doubt most men cherish deep beliefs for which they can assign no reasons: “real assents,” rather than “notional assents,” in Newman’s phrase. But Emerson’s profession of inability to argue need not be accepted too literally. It is a mask of humility covering a subtle policy: a plea in confession and avoidance: a throwing off of responsibility in forma pauperis. He could argue well, when he wanted to. In these journals, for example, he exposes, with admirable shrewdness, the unreasonableness and inconsistency of Alcott, Thoreau, and others, who refused to pay taxes because Massachusetts enforced the fugitive slave law: “As long as the state means you well, do not refuse your pistareen. You have a tottering cause: ninety parts of the pistareen it will spend for what you think also good: ten parts for mischief. You cannot fight heartily for a fraction… The state tax does not pay the Mexican War. Your coat, your sugar, your Latin and French and German book, your watch does. Yet these you do not stick at buying.”

      Again, is it true that Emerson is the only great mind in American literature? Of his greatness of mind there can be no question; but how far was that mind in literature? No one doubts that Poe, or Hawthorne, or Longfellow, or Irving was in literature: was, above all things else, a man of letters. But the gravamen of Emerson’s writing appears to many to fall outside of the domain of letters: to lie in the provinces of ethics, religion, and speculative thought. They acknowledge that his writings have wonderful force and beauty, have literary quality; but tried by his subject matter, he is more a philosopher, a moralist, a theosophist, than a poet or a man of letters who deals with this human life as he finds it. A theosophist, not of course a theologian. Emerson is the most religious of thinkers, but by 1836, when his first book, “Nature,” was published, he had thought himself free of dogma and creed. Not the least interest of the journals is in the evidence they give of the process, the steps of growth by which he won to his perfected system. As early as 1824 we find a letter to Plato, remarkable in its mature gravity for a youth of twenty-one, questioning the exclusive claim of the Christian Revelation: “Of this Revelation I am the ardent friend. Of the Being who sent it I am the child… But I confess it has not for me the same exclusive and extraordinary claims it has for many. I hold Reason to be a prior Revelation… I need not inform you in all its depraved details of the theology under whose chains Calvin of Geneva bound Europe down; but this opinion, that the Revelation had become necessary to the salvation of men through some conjunction of events in heaven, is one of its vagaries.”

      Emerson refused to affirm personality of God, “because it is too little, not too much.” Here, for instance, in the journal for Sunday, May 22, 1836, is the seed of the passage in the “Divinity School Address” which complains that “historical Christianity.. dwells with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus”: “The talk of the kitchen and the cottage is exclusively occupied with persons… And yet, when cultivated men speak of God, they demand a biography of him as steadily as the kitchen and the bar-room demand personalities of men… Theism must be, and the name of God must be, because it is a necessity of the human mind to apprehend the relative as flowing from the absolute, and we shall always give the absolute a name.”

      The theosophist whose soul is in direct contact with the “Oversoul” needs no “evidences of Christianity,” nor any revelation through the scripture or the written word. Revelation is to him something more immediate – a doctrine, said Andrews Norton, which is not merely a heresy, but is not even an intelligible error. Neither does the mystic seek proof of God’s existence from the arguments of natural theology. “The intellectual power is not the gift, but the presence of God. Nor do we reason to the being of God, but God goes with us into Nature, when we go or think at all.”

      The popular faith does not warm to Emerson’s impersonal deity. “I cannot love or worship an abstraction,” it says. “I must have a Father to believe in and pray to: a Father who loves and watches over me. As for the immortality you offer, it has no promise for the heart.

      My servant Death, with solving rite,

      Pours finite into infinite.

      I do not know what it means to be absorbed into the absolute. The loss of conscious personal life is the loss of all. To awake into another state of being without a memory of this, is such a loss; and is, besides, inconceivable. I want to be reunited to my friends. I want my heaven to be a continuation of my earth. And hang Brahma!”

      In literature, as in religion, this impersonality has disconcerting aspects to the man who dwells in the world of the senses and the understanding. “Some men,” says a note of 1844, “have the perception of difference predominant, and are conversant with surfaces and trifles, with coats and coaches and faces and cities; these are the men of talent. And other men abide by the perception of Identity: these are the Orientals, the philosophers, the men of faith and divinity, the men of genius.”

      All this has a familiar look to readers who remember the chapter on Plato in “Representative Men,” or passages like the following from “The Oversoul”: “In youth we are mad for persons. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them all.” Now, in mundane letters it is the difference that counts, the più and not the uno. The common nature may be taken for granted. In drama and fiction, particularly, difference is life and identity is death; and this “tyrannizing unity” would cut the ground from under them both.

      This philosophical attitude did not keep Emerson from having a sharp eye for personal traits. His sketch of Thoreau in “Excursions” is a masterpiece; and so is the half-humorous portrait of Socrates in “Representative Men”; and both these are matched by the keen analysis of Daniel Webster in the journals. All going to show that this transcendentalist had something of “the devouring eye and the portraying hand” with which he credits Carlyle.

      As in religion and in literature, so in the common human relations, this impersonality gives a peculiar twist to Emerson’s thought. The coldness of his essays on “Love” and “Friendship” has been often pointed out. His love is the high Platonic love. He is enamored of perfection, and individual men and women are only broken images of the absolute good.

      Have I a lover who is noble and free?

      I would he were nobler than to love me.

      Alas! nous autres, we do not love our friends because they are more or less perfect reflections of divinity. We love them in spite of their faults: almost because of their faults: at least we love their faults because they are theirs. “You are in love with certain attributes,” said the fair blue-stocking in “Hyperion” to her suitor. “ ‘Madam,’ said I, ‘damn your attributes!’ ”

      Another puzzle in Emerson, to the general reader, is the centrality of his thought. I remember a remark of Professor Thomas A. Thacher, upon hearing an address of W. T. Harris, the distinguished Hegelian and educationalist. He said that Mr. Harris went a long way back for a jump. So Emerson draws lines of relation from every least thing to the centre.

      A subtle chain of countless rings

      The next unto the farthest brings.

      He never lets go his hold upon his theosophy. All his wagons are hitched to stars: himself from God he cannot free. But the citizen does not like to be always reminded of God, as he goes about his daily affairs. It carries a disturbing suggestion of death and the judgment and eternity and the other world. But, for the present, this comfortable phenomenal world of time and space is good enough for him. “So a’ cried out, ‘God, God, God!’ three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him a’ should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet.”

      Another СКАЧАТЬ